Cipher or unknown language - historical perspective

[Stefan Wirtz_2]

You all seem to count direction-changes and stops as different strokes.

No, I count a stroke each time the quill is lifted off the vellum and moved to start writing elsewhere. With my somewhat limited (but nonzero) experience with the quill, the below seems to me to be the most likely way the letters in my image above were penned (quilled?):
[..]

These close-ups all seem to show disturbances during lining or drying, just as "stumbling" over some vellum roughnesses and forced resetting, or spots were the ink was not properly or evenly absorbed by the material.

This has nothing to do with the basic concept of letters to be drawn in one single line, which applies to nearly all VMS characters.